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Solipsism and Academic Philosophy's Casual Cruelty

By Jon Cogburn

I know that I'm not the only person who has been taking a deep look at the disciplinary norms in academic philosophy since reading Elizabeth Barnes' philosop-her essay ("Confessions of a Bitter Cripple") from a few weeks ago. Please read the whole thing if you haven't. One part in Barnes' piece that really threw me was this:

I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.

If you're connected to the biz in any capacity, it should be impossible to read this without thinking something along the lines of WHAT'S WRONG WITH US? This is the kind of casual sadism that the early seasons of Mad Men made an art of exposing. But we're not talking about a benighted past, or about advertizing grifters on the make. If loving wisdom is good for anything, it should be good for not acting like the men in the early seasons of Mad Men.

And for the last few weeks I've been constantly trying to understand why it's part of the remit of an academic philosopher to confidently and casually make sweeping judgments in passing that implicate the worthlessness of an interlocutor at best, and genocide at worst. My brain has settled on a couple of thoughts. I honestly don't know how fatuous they are, and I hope that people will take the time to correct me to the extent that they are. I'm also a priori certain that other people have probably said the same things better, and I hope that people will take the time to point me to the relevant work.

My hypothesis is that contemporary analytic philosophy is haunted by a solipsism that forms what continental philosophers call a "horizon" for much analytic work concerned with deontic norms. By 'solipsism' I don't mean the view that only I exist, but rather the methodological and normative privileging of the individual. Methodological solipsism is the view that philosophical explanation primarily concerns individual agents. With respect to ethics this means that an ethical theory should primarily be concerned with correctly predicting what individuals ought and ought not do (with room thrown in for supererogation and its opposite as well). Normative solipsism is the view that independence or a narrowly defined version of autonomy is a core part of the highest good.

I'm enough of a Marxist not to think that all philosophical obnoxiousness and cruelty follows from the predominance of these kinds of solipsism any more than I think that all economic obnoxiousness and cruelty follow from (the similarly solipsistic) Horatio Alger myth, or any myth from that matter. First, humans are endlessly inventive with respect to varieties of inhumanity. Second, we shouldn't overestimate the causal role of beliefs in human behavior. Nonetheless, I do hope that exposing the ideological superstructure can sometimes effect the behavioral base.

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First I want to briefly examine some of the most popular gedankenexperiments in philosophy that strike me as evincing the kind of casual sadism that Barnes describes. In the philosophy of mind we have the Chinese Nation thought experiment, which the SEP summarizes thusly:

In “Troubles with Functionalism”, also published in 1978, Ned Block envisions the entire population of China implementing the functions of neurons in the brain. This scenario has subsequently been called “The Chinese Nation” or “The Chinese Gym”. We can suppose that every Chinese citizen would be given a call-list of phone numbers, and at a preset time on implementation day, designated “input” citizens would initiate the process by calling those on their call-list. When any citizen's phone rang, he or she would then phone those on his or her list, who would in turn contact yet others. No phone message need be exchanged; all that is required is the pattern of calling. The call-lists would be constructed in such a way that the patterns of calls implemented the same patterns of activation that occur between neurons in someone's brain when that person is in a mental state—pain, for example. The phone calls play the same functional role as neurons causing one another to fire. Block was primarily interested in qualia, and in particular, whether it is plausible to hold that the population of China might collectively be in pain, while no individual member of the population experienced any pain, but the thought experiment applies to any mental states and operations, including understanding language.

This is grossly insensitive and in fact racist because something like this actually happens periodically in history, where a set of rigid instructions is given from the top, and millions of people have to uniformly co-ordinate their behavior. This usually results in genocidal levels of starvation, such as with the actual Great Leap Forward in China (1958-1961) which led to the deaths of somewhere between thirty and forty million people. The Great Chinese Famine is not an instance of some wacky thing that Chinese people are prone to do, but rather (as is arguably always the case with famines and genocides by removal) part of a complex and tragic history involving prior occupation and civil war. It's also not something particularly Chinese, as preventable human caused famines are a historical constant since not long after the invention of agriculture. But the Chinese Nation thought experiment is almost designed to make people who use it dumber and less humane in every relevant way with respect to Chinese history. Those wacky Chinese working collectively!

Or consider the issue of whether to redirect a trolley so that it kills one person rather than five people, the fat man variants of the trolley problem, or the related one concerning whether or not to dynamite a fat man blocking the cave, or or whether you help the Central American guerrillas (or death squad, I forget) kill a person. Again, it's almost as if these are designed to make people less humane and dumber with respect to the complex history of a great deal of human suffering, obviously with respect to body shaming, eating disorders, transportation policy (I am not being facetious; this currently kills and mangles far more people than war), and post-colonialism, but (as I will argue) even more generally with respect to how to think about tragic choices in one's own life. I also dimly remember from the 1990s fellow graduate students laughing about some then famous philosopher's series of thought experiments involving torturing cats in various ways (surely a perverse homage to Schrodinger; fortunately, these seem to have leveled off since the 1990s).

Let me be clear that I'm *not* saying we shouldn't philosophize about inhumanity. For a paradigm of how to do this, read Jonathan Glover's Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. There's nothing facile or fatuous about Glover's philosophical discussions in part because he actually informs his normative speculation with deep examinations into the relevant psychology, history, economics, etc.

Back to the fatuous thought experiments. You don't have to step too far back to start wondering why contemporary philosophy finds itself almost constitutively glib and facile in this way. In what follows I'm going to try to follow the principle of charity and find the best possible reasons for thinking that philosophical explanation requires these little ceremonies of vapid cruelty, where the listener is bullied into imaginative complicity with respect to the perpetuation of human suffering and death. Let me here first note that I don't mean to be dismissing irrational reasons. In particular, there's a complicated connection between humor and cruelty. We have an I think somewhat natural tendency to find gedankenexperiments funnier the crueler they are. Whether or not it's natural, lots of us surely do respond this way. Second, we're narrative creatures and gedankenexperiments that are narratively vivid probably have some kind of selective advantage with respect to being remembered and talked about. Cruelty provides the requisite frisson. Third, getting people to engage in and submit to public displays of cruelty form a particularly effective manner of (usually male) bonding in human societies. However, in what follows, I'm asking if there are any potentially reasons that might justify philosophers in trying to make listeners imaginatively complicit in perpetrating cruel actions.

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I want to start with a bit of the SEP article on Rawls' notion of reflective equilibrium:

The most abstract aim of political philosophy is to reach justified conclusions about how political institutions should be arranged. For Rawls how justified one is in one's political convictions depends on how close one is to achieving reflective equilibrium. In reflective equilibrium all of one's beliefs, on all levels of generality, cohere perfectly with one another. Thus in reflective equilibrium one's specific political judgments (e.g., “slavery is unjust,” “imprisonment without trial is unjust”) support one's more general political convictions (e.g., “all citizens have certain basic rights”) which support one's very abstract beliefs about oneself and one's world (e.g., “all citizens are free and equal”). Viewed from the opposite direction, in reflective equilibrium one's abstract beliefs explain one's more general convictions which in turn explain one's specific judgments. Were one to attain reflective equilibrium, the justification of each belief would follow from all beliefs relating in these networks of mutual support and explanation.

I think that this is such a powerful picture because it gives philosophers a role homologous to (the way philosophers see) natural scientists. The role of science is to come up with a theory (T, or T prime, take your pick) such that if you plug in the description of a system (experiment or natural bit of the universe) the theory allows you to predict the evolution of the system within margins of error. With the picture of reflective equilibrium, ethicists and political philospohers can now do the same thing, except their theory Ts generate (when descriptions of the relevant bits of actual or counterfactual reality are added) specific predictions about what is or is not morally obligatory, permissible, and/or supererogatory.

There are lots of problems with this conception of "theory" both in the philosophy of science and ethics. I know several Kantians that are acutely bitter about how it leads to the textbook treatment of Kant being both systematically wrong with respect to, and much less plausible than, Kant's actual views. But let's pass over these problems.

Add to the theory T model of theories the additional view that the primary task of a normative ethics is to determine what an individual's moral obligations are. As far as I know, Rawls didn't believe this, but political philosophy is standardly taken to be in some sense secondary to normative ethics in part because the two are standardly differentiated by how the latter treats an individual's choices and the former societal choices.

As a non-ethicist it does seem to me that a great deal of ethics only makes sense if you presuppose something like the theory T model of ethical theory combined with the methodologically solipsistic view that the primary function of ethical theory is to generate correct prescriptions for what individuals should do. And (again as a non-ethicist) I think that this approach reaches the pinnacle of absurdity with respect to the trolley problem literature. Sartre's earnest pleading to the side, it makes no sense to think that how people might respond in a one-off tragic choice scenario says very much at all about them.

More perversely, the focus on the individual responsibility covers up the structural and institutional causes of the overwhelming majority of tragic choices in real life. The closest thing to a trolley scenario that most people reading this will have to confront is jury duty. The prosecution lawyer will try to get you to convict someone of breaking an unjust law by convincing you that the person is dangerous over and above the crime of which he's being convicted. In some cases the prosecution is clearly correct. So your decision is to send a predatory person to prison unjustly or inflict that person on his community again. From my two experiences of jury duty prosecutors are very, very good at guilting jurors who might have qualms about the laws in question, or about the prison system, into going ahead and sending the person to prison. To be clear, the juror is radically epistemically limited with respect to whether the accused really is predatory, and it's here where racism works as a kind of shortcut to help the prosecutor convince the juror that it really is a tragic choice.

So what should one do? Well just leaving it at the question of what one person should do is part of the problem, an excuse not to look at the structures that gave rise to the existence of the trolley in the first place. Drug prohibition is in part so awful because it removes the state's monopoly on violence in enforcing contracts. This guarantees massive amounts of violence in the markets for the prohibited product. This environment creates and sustains particularly violent forms of human predation. But setting the parameters of the debate in terms of how you will act given a tragic choice (subject the person to an American prison or subject the populace to the person) systematically works to sustain the system that creates the range of tragic choices in the first place.

One could still be a methodological solipsist and a theory Tist without thinking that theory T should issue consistent predictions about one's obligations with respect to tragic choice type gedankenexperiments. And some amount of casual sadism in philosophy might be thus avoided. But one's picture of theory T with respect to ethics would become less and less homologous to the old school Deductive-Nomological picture of scientific theory still hanging around in the collective unconscious of philosophers of mind, metaphysicians, and ethicists.** While this would (I think) be an unalloyed good, I don't think that chucking theory Tism goes nearly far enough.

*

Normative solipsism is the tendency to see individual autonomy** and independence is a core part of the highest good. At least in their textbook versions, Aristotle and Kant suggest something like this (and Heidegger perversely recapitulates the trope with respect to the special status of Dasein) for roughly similar reasons. If you aren't able to reach (and for Kant freely rationally chose) the highest good then it's not really the highest good. So a core part of the highest good for humans is the ability to freely rationally chose and attain the highest good.

There are lots of ways one can try to make this reasoning more precise. Note however, that if you are already a methodological solipsist, and accept the principle that one only has an obligation to the extent that one can fulfill it ("ought implies can"), then something like normative solipsism is strongly suggested. Methodological solipsism entails that theory T should allow us to determine what actions are obligatory, permissible, and supererogatory for you. If ought implies can is correct, then a person who is more autonomous would have more obligations than a person who is less autonomous. If one's view of humanity is centrally as creatures that are answerable to norms, then it's better to be more fully in the space of reasons, bound to more correct obligations. Our autonomy then becomes the characteristically human way we are able to achieve characteristically human goods.

But this kind of thinking leads to a radically warped view of human flourishing. In his TLS review of Alisdair MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals*** Blackburn starts by asking the question of why philosopher's depictions of people living the highest life are so reliably absurd. If I remember right he quotes Nietzsche and Aristotle for evidence of the absurdity. According to Blackburn, in every case the absurdity is due to the overestimation of a certain kind of autonomy as a human good. MacIntyre's late era metaphysical picture,**** on the other hand, stresses the radical dependence that human beings have on one another.

Slavoj Žižek has a routine about people who want to treat health care as a market. Žižek asks if we really want to have to deal with every health transaction in the same way we have to deal with buying a car. His simple point is that the freedom to do things worthwhile is only possible with respect to not being autonomous in all sorts of other areas in one's life. This isn't a point merely about capitalism but a metaphysical point about human beings. We're obviously radically dependent while young and old, and in between we make things worse by trying to convince ourselves that we are not radically dependent upon one another. But, at least in the hands of philosophers, this normative solipsism leads to a warped model of human flourishing. But Žižek (really Hegel, whom he cites) is correct. There's no such thing as "autonomy," if one means by that something the quantity of which can be added to people so that they are more or less autonomous. Notions such as "autonomy"***** and "freedom" are always going to only make sense relative both to the other humans on which we are dependent and the kind of activity in question. At least on their classical understanding, neither is an unalloyed good.

From reading people like Shelly Tremain (one of the principle bloggers at Discrimination and Disadvantage) I know that disability theorists have keen insight into the failings of normative solipsism. But from Barnes' essay, I wonder if that mainstream analytic philosophy has been almost constitutively resistant to these insights.

Jeet Heer investigates a burning question today: why are most libertarians men? He offers several plausible explanations, but I think he misses the real one, perhaps because it's pretty unflattering to libertarians.

So here's the quick answer: Hardcore libertarianism is a fantasy. It's a fantasy where the strongest and most self-reliant folks end up at the top of the heap, and a fair number of men share the fantasy that they are these folks. They believe they've been held back by rules and regulations designed to help the weak, and in a libertarian culture their talents would be obvious and they'd naturally rise to positions of power and influence.

Most of them are wrong, of course. In a truly libertarian culture, nearly all of them would be squashed like ants—mostly by the same people who are squashing them now. But the fantasy lives on regardless.

Few women share this fantasy. I don't know why, and I don't really want to play amateur sociologist and guess. Perhaps it's something as simple as the plain observation that in the more libertarian past, women were subjugated to men almost completely. Why would that seem like an appealing fantasy?

The last paragraph shows how Drum realizes his answer pushes the question back further. Libertarianism feeds into a typically masculine fantasy. But why are men more likely to suffer from these kinds of delusions?

In any case, a constitutive part of the delusion is the denial of the manner in which radical dependency is a constitutive part of the human good. We are only free to do things we find worthwhile (which is the only form of freedom worth having) because we so radically depend on others. And a major part of the meaning we discover is in helping one another and being helped. I suspect that methodological and normative solipsism in some ways delivers academic philosophy into a more refined version of the libertarian fantasy, and that a non-trivial amount of the cruelty described by Barnes is a function of this. To be disabled is often to be dependent in some aspect of your life where other people of similar age are not so dependent. If you believed in the myth of autonomy strongly enough (both that it's the summum bonum and that it's additive), then abhorrent views Barnes recounts might actually start to seem commonsensical.

Barnes describes her forthcoming book thusly:

I’m now putting the very finishing touches on a book on disability, though, so that strange and unnatural thing is more or less what I’ve been doing for the last two years. My book is an attempt to show that the the kinds of things that often get said about disability within the Disability Rights Movement – that disability is a valuable part of human diversity, that disability is a social identity that disabled people should claim and be proud of, that many of the most significant harms of being disabled are social harms – have clear philosophical defenses and aren’t nearly as counterintuitive as many philosophers seem to assume.

I can't wait to read this book. The task seems vital to me, not just with respect to social justice issues involving disability (though clearly, that's important enough) but with respect to our conceptions of both what it is to be a person and what it is to be a a certain kind of person who claims to love wisdom.

[Notes:

*For what it's worth, I defend such a position in my article in the Priest, Beall, Amour-Garb law of non-contradiction anthology. I still think that something like moral dialetheism is right, though after thinking through Barnes' piece these last few weeks, if I were to return to that project I would probably only still believe it if I could motivate it in a significantly different manner.

**My colleague James Rocha has an account of autonomy whereby an act's status as autonomous depends in part on whether it is conducive to goodness. This is a radical departure from the standard autonomy theory fare involving meta-beliefs and meta-desires invoked to deal with akrasia (surprise, surprise, often involving diet). In addition to dealing with that literature's characteristic aporia, Rocha's view strikes me as important and plausible because it fits so much better with the Hegelian critique of libertarian accounts of freedom.

***It stinks that the Times Literary Supplement does not publicly archive Simon Blackburn's wonderful book reviews.

****I think on the standard narrative told by "social-practice theorist" fans of MacIntyre, he quickly abandoned the After Virtue callfor a non-Aristotelian account of teleology. I see Dependent Rational Animals as very much as part of an answer to that call. I hope some day to be able to reread the books in between with that in mind.

*****Again, I think James Rocha's account of autonomy accommodates this.]

Comments

Solipsism and Academic Philosophy's Casual Cruelty

By Jon Cogburn

I know that I'm not the only person who has been taking a deep look at the disciplinary norms in academic philosophy since reading Elizabeth Barnes' philosop-her essay ("Confessions of a Bitter Cripple") from a few weeks ago. Please read the whole thing if you haven't. One part in Barnes' piece that really threw me was this:

I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk.

If you're connected to the biz in any capacity, it should be impossible to read this without thinking something along the lines of WHAT'S WRONG WITH US? This is the kind of casual sadism that the early seasons of Mad Men made an art of exposing. But we're not talking about a benighted past, or about advertizing grifters on the make. If loving wisdom is good for anything, it should be good for not acting like the men in the early seasons of Mad Men.